As the world exploded around him, James’s consciousness was forcefully shattered.

  The last sensation he felt was that of being struck from above across every section of his body with a giant hammer.

  Then darkness fell—but only for a moment. His consciousness splintered into a million little pieces, but something inside him appeared to be resistant to his mind scattering against his will.

  James opened his eyes and found himself floating in the air. The first sensation he felt was the wind. It moved around and through him. As he looked down, he realized he was hovering above the Fisher Kingdom specifically. He recognized the community center immediately.

  What is this? I wasn’t using my powers, was I?

  The last few minutes were sort of a blank. James remembered that he had been talking to Bear—no, Vidarr.

  Vidarr blessed me, and then—

  The memory of the intense pressure and pain from when the world had exploded struck him, and James winced slightly. He stopped trying to recall in detail for the moment.

  Right. I don’t quite feel it here, but my body is probably fucked right now.

  He looked down and tried to focus visually on the area where he had been. It was much easier than it should have been.

  Instead of dense forest, there was now a large, partially flattened space where he and Vidarr had wandered for their conversation.

  From above, a chunk of the Fisher Kingdom had been leveled; it looked like it had been smashed down with a giant cylinder of some sort. Every tree within a certain radius—maybe thirty or forty feet in each direction—had been pulverized into chunks. It appeared that one of James’s apartment buildings had been smashed up a little, too.

  And a crowd was gathered outside. They seemed to have formed a perimeter close to the edge of the circle of destruction.

  Goddamned System… Is anyone hurt? He focused on the people on the ground, and his consciousness started to dip toward the surface level.

  Suddenly his immaterial form dropped like a stone.

  Then he could hear the crowd. He could see them from up close. He was among them.

  This is so weird. James felt as if he was in between two people, despite the fact that their bodies were pressed close together, leaving no space for him if he was in a physical body.

  “All right, now that we have a little privacy, tell me what happened.” Leo DaSilva was speaking to a male figure with sallow skin, greasy black hair, and a hooked nose. The two men had stepped away from the gathered circle, as if one was about to take the other into his confidence.

  “As I said before, I really don’t understand what happened,” the other man began. He sounded slightly annoyed to still be talking to the Chief of Police.

  Leo clapped a heavy hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “I don’t need your interpretation,” he said in a voice heavy with patience. “I just need you to tell me what you observed. You were one of the only people who was close to the forest when the world exploded. The other people are in bits and pieces or severely injured. I need to know what’s going on. Even if you don’t have a clear idea, that’s what police are for. We investigate. So, what did you hear and see?”

  “Very well. I heard a voice, and I saw a message.”

  “You—you saw…?”

  “There was a pop-up. It was like a System message.” The man nodded as if agreeing with himself. “I think the voice was the same one I heard when the System first appeared, on that day a few months ago—”

  “It was the System that did this,” Leo said in a low voice, almost disbelieving, disregarding the other man’s slight rambling. “Damn it. Why am I so surprised? The System loves fucking with us…”

  “What are you saying?” the man asked. “Is the System attacking the Kingdom?”

  There was a murmur from the people gathered, as one or two of them must have overheard a snatch of the conversation.

  “Keep your voice down,” Leo hissed. “And don’t tell anyone about this! You could spark a panic. We don’t have any idea what happened here. I’ll meet with the King later. I’m sure he’ll know what this was.”

  James found himself pleased with Leo’s management of the situation. James hadn’t known much of what to expect from his Chief of Police, but quelling panic was all he could reasonably hope for Leo to do here. And Leo seemed to think along the same lines as James.

  “Right, right,” said the other man.

  “Listen, what’s your name?” Leo asked. He gestured at the apartments around them. “And where do you stay around here? I may have more questions later, and I can hopefully give you an update when I know more—provided, of course, that you don’t get any rumors going by yapping about what you’ve just told me…”

  James regretfully pulled himself away from Leo’s admirable crisis management. The mention of his name had reminded him that his unconscious body was in the wreckage of this disaster, along with his mother’s. It could be problematic if the public were to see him pulled from the thick of the destruction, badly hurt and unconscious. The image might even lead to the panic that Leo was worried about.

  The Fisher King was the symbol of his Kingdom’s strength, after all.

  James focused on returning to where his physical body was, and suddenly his astral form shot across the landscape, hurtling toward the location of his fallen figure. He streaked across the landscape so quickly that he could hardly take in the space he passed through—though there was not much in that area in any case, the violence of the System having shattered everything that stood.

  In a moment, he floated beside where his body was. But the first thing he saw was Mina. She knelt silently beside his battered, broken body, pouring healing power into it. James’s mother was also there, still alive, although one of her arms had been splattered into complete mush below the elbow, and the rest of her body looked in similarly bad shape to James’s body.

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  Oh, no, you can’t focus on me right now, Mina, James thought. If I survived those injuries, I’ll recover from them eventually. Mom doesn’t have any healing Skills, and she definitely doesn’t have any passive healing Skills like mine. There was a reasonably high chance that his mother could die, just from being slammed into the ground by James’s body when he took the hit from the System’s attack.

  After all, it had been an attack designed to remove the presence of a god—or a god’s avatar, at least.

  I guess I’ll just tell her.

  James focused his mind on trying to re-inhabit his mess of a body. He felt an intangible resistance to his presence there, but he pushed through.

  After a moment, he felt his kinesthesia return. He knew where all his limbs were and felt his positioning on the ground—and he felt intense, overwhelming pain that far surpassed what his Pain Resistance Skill could suppress. Every part of his body seemed to be a wreck.

  He tried to open his mouth to speak—“Mina,” he mumbled—and then he felt as if he might die. His consciousness shattered into a thousand pieces.

  When James came to, he was in the floating world once again, hovering just above the space where Mina worked on his body.

  Goddammnit. What did I train my Pain Resistance for…?

  In his annoyance, he ignored the fact that he had never deliberately trained his Pain Resistance; it was something that had developed because of his propensity for losing limbs and breaking bones. He had never tested its ability to mitigate nearly destroying his entire body.

  James went into problem-solving mode.

  What can I still do while my body isn’t working?

  First, he pulled himself closer to where his body lay again. It was hard to miss the fact that Mina was making little headway with Laying On Hands. His injuries were profound, and his natural healing abilities were probably stronger than her barely-trained, copied healing Skill.

  I wish I could tell her to focus on Mom for now, he thought.

  James looked at his mother’s unconscious form and thought that he noticed her breathing had grown shallower. It was impossible to be certain, because he did not have the same level of superhuman senses without control over his physical body.

  It was absolutely clear, however, that she still bled from the stump of her pulverized limb, albeit slowly. James was not surprised Mina had not addressed this yet. She had no medical training, and his own body looked like it had been crushed in some sort of industrial accident. It was natural for any woman to prioritize her husband’s wellbeing over that of her mother-in-law.

  But if things continued on as they were, he expected that Zora would die here.

  Experimentally, he reached out with his Fisher King powers. He touched the soil that was imbued with his aura, and to his pleasant surprise, the earth responded.

  It wasn’t much. James had not attempted anything dramatic.

  A tiny tendril of dirt rose from just beside his body, and then it flopped down again, like a gently wagging finger.

  Jackpot.

  Mina had not noticed a thing. She had her tunnel vision on, looking for the worst areas of James’s injuries and trying to mitigate where there was likely damage to internal organs, the brain, or the spine.

  But James thought he knew how to penetrate those layers of focus.

  He focused again, and he ordered the soil to move in a much less subtle way.

  A wall of earth suddenly rose out of the ground and separated Mina and the unconscious forms of her patients from the Fisher Kingdom’s line of sight. James’s body was at such a low elevation—Mina had not dug it out fully from the tree limbs all around it yet—that no one would have been able to see it up to now.

  But he did not want to take any chances of someone seeing what was happening.

  As the barrier appeared, Mina instantly switched modes, from healing to combat-ready. The color of her aura changed from green to fiery red, her whole body tensed up, and her head rapidly turned from side to side, looking for whoever had just used magic on the soil. She clearly expected a challenge.

  [I didn’t mean to scare you.]

  James had tried to explain himself, purely reflexively rather than thinking it would actually work. But to his surprise, the sound of the words actually materialized, emanating from the air beside Mina’s ear.

  “Skapi?” Her voice came out quiet and unsteady, almost a whimper. For the first time, James noticed that there were tears in the corners of her eyes. Had those been there already, or were they tears of relief?

  She looked down at James’s useless body as if she expected his lips to move.

  [Yes, it’s me. My consciousness is separate from my body at the moment, due to the extent of my injuries. I don’t think any of them are serious anymore, but I will need a bit of recovery time. The combination of your healing and my natural recovery Skills have me in the clear, I’m pretty sure.]

  James was stretching the truth with much of this. From what he could see, Mina’s Laying On Hands was not actually doing much, and he thought his injuries were actually just as horrible and serious as they looked, but he had to choose his words carefully at the moment.

  [My Mom’s going to die if you don’t heal her arm, though.]

  Now he went straight to the point.

  Mina nodded, turned, and immediately switched from offensive magic to healing again. James appreciated the trust that her actions conveyed, and he was also impressed as always by her deft control of her magic—a knack for those Skills that he still sorely lacked.

  Of course, he was particularly relieved to see his mother’s bleeding reduce to a trickle, and her flesh and bone slowly begin to reshape itself where there had been a fully destroyed lower arm a moment before.

  [The last thing I wanted to mention, besides thanking you for healing me and my Mom, is that I was hoping you could avoid me being seen in this condition by the citizens. I was just listening to the gathered crowd over there, and I think Leo has his hands full keeping them from panicking. It would be best if they don’t see how bad my injuries look.]

  She did not pause in her efforts but simply spoke as if talking required no additional focus, without looking up from Zora’s regenerating arm.

  “I have a way to transport you back without being seen, skapi. Both you and your mother. But how did this happen? Is there an enemy still close?”

  [Not exactly, but we might want to sell it as the result of an epic battle or something…]

  James explained the events that had occurred leading up to the System destroying everything around Vidarr and James.

  That reminds me…

  He reached out with his senses, looking for any remnants of Vidarr’s body. Even the avatar of a god would undoubtedly drop some good loot when destroyed, and if James could Pillage something from a literal god, he might become truly unstoppable.

  Unfortunately, what he found was less promising. The body appeared to have completely disintegrated, and the ashes had been scattered or destroyed or mixed with the debris of the forest’s destruction in some way that would likely prevent James from Pillaging them.

  What did remain—which he used his power over the soil to maneuver into Mina’s custody—were Vidarr’s black cloak and featureless mask. Both items appeared curiously undamaged by the cataclysmic force that had destroyed Vidarr’s avatar so thoroughly and almost killed James and his mother.

  Mina appeared uncharacteristically incurious about the items, still focused on her mission. She just stashed them inside her Small Bag of Deceptive Dimensions at James’s request and continued healing

  Even in his non-material form, James could not help but smile.

  I picked a really reliable wife.

  As he waited for her to place his body into the bag, he thought about what he would do with his floating consciousness, assuming that it would take some time for his body to recover enough to be usable.

  There was an obvious answer.

  I’ll go and check how Alan and Mitzi are doing, he thought.

  James told Mina his plan, and then he took off.